Pirates of the Web

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Published: July 11, 2002

LAST week, at age 29, John Sankus Jr. moved out of his parents' house for the first time. He and his parents drove 150 miles from their home in suburban Philadelphia to his new one: a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pa.

Mr. Sankus, who entered the minimum-security prison on July 2 to serve a 46-month sentence, is a soft-spoken, churchgoing computer technician who still has the plush stuffed whales from his childhood.

But United States Customs Service investigators and prosecutors say he was also a ringleader of an international gang of software pirates that deprived companies of millions of dollars through the illegal distribution of copyrighted software, games and movies on the Internet. In February, Mr. Sankus pleaded guilty to a felony count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

The piracy group, known as DrinkorDie, was among the chief targets of more than 100 coordinated raids in the United States and abroad last December. So far 15 people in the United States have pleaded guilty to criminal charges as a result of the raids, including a Duke University student, a programmer at the University of California at Los Angeles, an employee at an Internet service provider and several executives at technology companies. So far Mr. Sankus and five others have been sentenced to prison.

Interviews with Mr. Sankus and others involved in the case, including customs and law enforcement officials, offer an unusual glimpse into the world of Internet piracy. It is a community of sorts, with perhaps 30 major groups that issue pirated products by cracking the copy-protection codes of software or making illicit duplicates of movies.

Many of the pirates say they were motivated less by money than by a sense of competition, prestige and the entertainment value of distributing the pirated goods, which they call "warez."

"Most of the people I have been around with are not out to cheat anybody," said Mr. Sankus, a large, shy man who worked as a computer technician at a Gateway store. "They are out to have fun. It's just a hobby."

In an interview before he went off to prison, Mr. Sankus said he earned no money from software piracy. He described it rather as a social activity that consumed him.

He recounted the day when about 40 armed customs agents swooped into his workplace. "I felt like someone who had just murdered 50 people," he said.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Sankus helped steal millions of dollars' worth of intellectual property. And despite the guilty pleas from him and others, they add, the stealing continues because of the nature of the distribution medium.

"That's the difference — in the old world, if you stopped the source, you stopped the piracy," said Michael DuBose, a Justice Department lawyer who played a pivotal role in the piracy investigation. "But all the stuff that DrinkorDie put out there continues to be out there."

While Internet piracy slowed immediately after the December raids, activity has picked up again, investigators say. For example, Warcraft III, an eagerly anticipated game from Blizzard Entertainment, was "cracked" and released to the Internet only one day after a master CD for the game was created in mid-June.

For DrinkorDie members, piracy was the technological equivalent of joy riding — a form of bravado that could gain them acceptance in a hierarchical social sphere.

"It's all about stature," said David Grimes of Arlington, Tex., a DrinkorDie member who worked as a computer engineer at Check Point Software, a company that specializes in security solutions for software. "They are just trying to make a name for themselves for no reason other than self-gratification." Mr. Grimes is serving a 37-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to the same charge that Mr. Sankus did.

"It's the same reason that people join gangs," said Allan Doody, the Customs Service investigator who led the DrinkorDie investigation, part of a broader anti-piracy campaign called Operation Buccaneer. "They're hanging out on the cyber-street corner."

But in contrast to petty criminals and warring gangs, Internet piracy groups have a worldwide impact of at least tens of millions of dollars, if not more. Such groups secure their reputations by releasing thousands of free movies, games, music and software programs on the Internet each year.

While such groups rarely profit financially from their activities, their warez (pronounced like the word wares), proliferate rapidly around the world, reaching those who do sell them for gain — for example, people who hawk the software through pay-for-access Web sites or burn them on CD's for sale on the street, in shops or at Internet auction sites.

The copies "become the raw materials that others use for commercial piracy," said Bob Kruger, president of the Business Software Alliance, an industry group that asserts that software piracy costs $10.1 billion a year in lost sales worldwide.

The victims of piracy take the threat very seriously. Havard Vold, president of an eight-person company in Cincinnati called Vold Solutions, was horrified to discover that DrinkorDie had released a free version of a specialized engineering program that his company sold for $9,500.

"That was very scary," Mr. Vold said. "They do not understand the impact of copyright infringement, especially on the smaller companies."

Although the warez scene took root only in the early 1990's, piracy has expanded rapidly, particularly in the last five years.